What do you store on your PC?

[voiidwulf]

People always say things like:

Get a 120GB SSD for Windows/programs and a 1TB HDD for personal files.


I have like 600GB of programs, and like 10GB of personal files, and this isn't even strictly a gaming PC. I still do regular stuff like watching and editing movies and stuff. I store all my programs except for a few on my HDD.

I'm just wondering, what do you guys think? Do you have more programs than personal files?

 

[raytseng]

Even before SSDs, advanced windows administration (or other OS administration) always recommended separating data from Apps/OS.
Several good reasons, such as if something should crash then you have things separated, and easy to recover only the bit you need (and backup the drives you need to backup)

If you upgrade then it's easy to take your new data to the new system, and by the same token, do a clean wipe of the other disk.

How do you have 600gb of "programs"?
I suggest that a lot of that really is DATA and not application binaries.
Unless something is lost in translation and you mean the term programs to mean something else like recorded television programs

Add it up, if you really had 600gb of programs, that means you have about 150 installation DVDs lying around your computer.

Please give us a breakdown of your 600gb of programs, just for curiosity how did you get so much.

 

[voiidwulf]

I have a sheetload of games installed, a bunch of which are like 20GB, and that accounts for about 400GB of it. The other stuff is things like HD mods and stuff, so I suppose those aren't really programs. I have quite a few big programs like Sony Vegas and After Effects.

EDIT: Just counted, and its actually like 510GB. 600GB was just my estimate. Also, in response to your 150 installation CD's thing, most of the stuff is from Steam for the games.

 

[raytseng]

For steam games, you can search and find that many people will move their Steam games from their SSD to HD, once they are done actively playing them.

They get clever and do this with a symbolic link, so they don't really need to do a reinstall; and can pick and choose which games to move.

Search "mklink Steam" and you will get the info.

Yea, for those other things, you may need to look at the system requirements, and if there are also tricks to move or split non-crucial parts of the program to HDD. Or just bite the bullet and either just install that onto an HDD, or buy more SSD.

 

[pezonator]

For your situation I would recommend the following:

SSD for OS and some programs
1TB drive for Games (or 2TB)
1TB drive for "data" (or 2 or 3 TB)

I'm an extremely fussy person, so I have set mine up as follows:

SSD for OS and programs
2TB raid for games drive, game files and other programs
1TB for documents, files, music, pictures etc
2TB for Videos and backup of documents

The more you separate stuff, the less chance there is of losing something and consequently you get more performance because a less clogged up HDD is happier.

 

[raytseng]

or forgot to mention,

if you really need masses of stuff sped up;

then perhaps Intel SRT (or hybrid drive) is the better solution.


Most people I think have just Windows, maybe office and a few apps, then a few games they are actively playing at a time. If they are using Steam, then they maybe doing the the trick above to move stuff over.

 

[Delirious788]

So I can see the games taking up a lot of room, but I miss the lack of personal files. If you are truly editing video, then most likely you have more than 10Gb of personal data. I edit videos and have 100+ Gbs of raw video footage saved on my computer. Granted this is HD raw, uncompressed video, but still, video files add up quickly. Second, I used to play CounterStrike 1.6 a lot and would have about 30+ Gbs of files just for that game because of all the maps and sounds and such that I have downloaded from servers. The game itself takes no up no space, but with all the extra files it is a LOT more.

 

[voiidwulf]

It's not huge video editing, just like 700MB Bandicam recordings.

All my Steam games are on my HDD already. All I have on the SSD is Windows and Sony Vegas. I guess I should move some of my games that I play the most to my SSD. Maybe the Bethesdas due to all the loading screens when switching from exterior to interior and stuff.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I have more storage then programs. Most of my music is in flac format which is larger than mp3's. These alone take up almost 500 gig of data. Add in photos and videos, and it's over 1TB of data.

 

[WyomingKnott]

Just to follow Hawkeye22 back to the original question, I have about 50 GB of os and programs and perhaps ten time that of data. Music, photos, some video, a surprising amount of Email.

Heck, just the copies of my CDs so that I don't have to carry them around take up 30 GB.

But I'm not a PC gamer any more. Haven't played seriously since the second incarnation of Doom. So I can see where your bulk of installed programs comes from.

 

[voiidwulf]

Ahh, I see. My personal files basically consist of small images for wallpapers/avatars, and a few GB of movies. I mostly listen to music on YouTube now. I have text documents too, but most of them are less than 1MB so the total is probably like 50MB.

 

[mrbeanladen]

People always say things like:

Get a 120GB SSD for Windows/programs and a 1TB HDD for personal files.


I have like 600GB of programs, and like 10GB of personal files, and this isn't even strictly a gaming PC. I still do regular stuff like watching and editing movies and stuff. I store all my programs except for a few on my HDD.

I'm just wondering, what do you guys think? Do you have more programs than personal files?

mostly this:

then a few thousand music files
a few dozen movies
a lot of games
and a minimal amount of programs, stuff like for overclocking, cleaning the PC, defragging, AV, video converting, image editing and that's about all.

1TB, thought it would last me a lot longer but looks like I need more... maybe 4x 3tb would suffice, but after I get some money...

 

[voiidwulf]

mostly this: http://i.imgur.com/bQI15.jpg

Mine are all hidden among my program files. <_<

Lol, JK.